Tag: scam

Like most people, I get a lot of unsolicited emails in my inbox. This week I noticed an unusual trick from a conference organizer who was hoping to get noticed, a trick that is one of the least classy I’ve seen in a while. This sender intentionally wrote email invitations that included spelling errors, for which they sent a second email in which they apologized for the embarrasing typo.

The first conference invitation included the word “joint” instead of joined.

The apology came almost immediately after in an email titled “Terrible mistake”.

Notice the “PS”. It’s not a marketing trick. But it is. I got the same made up story last year. The first email then misspelled “shores” with the less appealing “whores”.

The follow up email that time had the title “Sincere apoligies”.

My advice, if you are trying to trick people into reading your emails, at least have the decency to reinvent yourself. That way you run less risk of being exposed as a liar.

It’s easy to trick people to click, like and share the dumbest things on social networks. I have blogged about this topic before, for example regarding how to spot a fake giveaway on Facebook. But I can’t stop being amazed at the number of people who are fooled by these easy hoaxes time and time again. Here’s a fresh example. Whitetail Overload is a Facebook page dedicated to the “pursuit of the Whitetail deer”, and it has half a million followers and a PTA (people talking about) of more than 1.3 million.

4 million likes on one post
How do they get that much engagement? They post often, entertaining and they trick users into interacting with the content in the most deceiving ways. Take this post for example, it uses and old trick, asking users to guess what happens when they click like on the post. Of course, absolutely nothing at all happens. But look at the numbers, 4.1 million people have liked the post and almost 100,000 have shared it. Incredible.

Here’s another one, and I must admit that this is as brilliant as it is evil. The last person to comment on the post wins a t-shirt. And of course, the comments never stop coming. As of now, there are 47,000. For a t-shirt!

As long as people are this naive, don’t be surprised when your social networks are filled with spam and scams.